The Art
of
Shahzia Sikander
Shahzia Sikander
Shahzia Sikander (born 1969) is a Pakistani-American visual artist. Sikander works across a variety of mediums, including drawing, painting, printmaking, animation, installation, performance and video. Sikander currently lives and works in New York City
Here are some of Shahzia Sikander's Artworks on display at Cantor Arts Centre, Stanford
Walled States, 2011
Ink & gouache on prepared paper
This work questions the ideas & convictions that propel national identities, exploring how these closely held personal beliefs are often ephemeral. The cartalogical form of the united States merges with the outline of the fort in the lost city of Julfar, connecting United States & Arab Emirates via the trade movement & ecologically destructive qualities of petroleum. Sikander works with the evocative capacity of ink to create delicate, almost atmospheric marks on the page to convey meaning. The lower half of the painting remains weighed down, almost in a state of disintegeration, with particles rising to the upper border of the page. thumbprints create marks on the upper page, and the ink transfer varies, signifying a transition from one chapter or state to the other.
Arose, 2020
Glass mosaic with patinated brass frame
The female body in work is an integral and multi-faceted protagonist. It is a breathing, living & ever-expanding entity. It is a concept, a marker, muse & duende. It is a signature foil to the extractive forces at play around us in geo-socio-political discourse. The stylized, often subsidiary women depicted in historic Mughal painting inspired the feminine figure in Arose. Here the form is transformed, multiplied & arranged into circular flower motif made with glass mosaic. Through this manipulation the artist releases the figure from her sources in history, granting her mobility. She spins, her skirt spiralling in an infinite pinwheel. as she exopands the figure's body, Sikander also doubles her face, showing her from two perspectives. Through multiplicity & a sense of movement, the artist has infused this form with power and agency
Infinite Women, 2019-21
Watercolour, Ink, gouache & gold leaf on paper
Do women move the earth? Do they control the earth? Does their labor move the earth? I see universal movement inherent in women, through their fertility, fecundity, their essence of being. women share stories, memories pass through them over generations. They are infiniteness.
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The large-scale drawing used both minute detail & monumentality to convey the immeasurable capacities of women. At first the central image resembles a parched earth or a satellite image. On closer inspection, however, the sphere is delicately formed by isolated gopis hair and gold leaf, centring feminine presence once again. by depicting a repeated standing female form shown in profile, a collective swarm of the gopis hair, and a globe, sikander demonstrates that the power of women exists beyond categorisation, political-social structure or restrictions. Yet these feminine forms are sharp and resemble spikes. Such power and presence are uncomfortable & painful to hold
Provenance The Invisible Hand from the Series The Illustrated Page 2009
Opaque watercolour hand painting, gold leaf & silkscreened pigment on paper (diptych)
Identifying, dismantling and transfoeming 19th & 20th century scholarship around tradition and nostalgia through a discursive and feminist lens captured by imagination and become my hunger. The diptych evokes two pages of an open manuscript. Whereas the historic manuscript format refrenced here would have been handheld, Sikander plays with scale, disrupting the preciousness of a one-of-a-kind illusytrated and illuminated manuscript through size & the medium of print,
